


The glass on the floor, the fire at the stake

by Veto_power_over_clocks



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Gen, Set after 49, lostlightfest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-11
Updated: 2016-10-11
Packaged: 2018-08-21 19:51:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8258423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Veto_power_over_clocks/pseuds/Veto_power_over_clocks
Summary: Rung and Velocity talk about holomatter avatars.Rung and Whirl mostly don't talk about Getaway's plans for Tailgate and watchmaking.(Mostly set after MTMTE #49 and before "Dying of the Light".)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Done for days 9 and 14 (Rung and Whirl, respectively) of [Lost Light Fest](http://zerokaiser.tumblr.com/post/151121924897/lostlightfest-will-be-sharing-your-efforts-here). Bless that for finally giving me enough motivation to finish this, since it had been sitting in my drafts for over two months.
> 
> I use female pronouns for Whirl's holomatter avatar because I'm greedy (which is my way to say that I tend to alternate between "he" and "she" in my head when I think about Whirl and there's no way I'm not taking the chance to use both here).
> 
> This fic's terribly self-indulgent. I just wanted to write Whirl's avatar, Rung, and a conversation about #47.

After four millions years of war and a lifetime trying to help people with their problems, Rung has learned the value of the quiet moments in-between appointments. You never know how the next patient will be doing and how you’ll be after seeing them, and so he tends to give himself a minute to shut his optics and leave his mind blank after he says goodbye. When the day’s appointments are over, he gives himself two minutes, sometimes three, depending on how he’s feeling. It’s a small ritual, one he tries to keep no matter what, but sometimes he’s forced to cut it short. Like today, since Velocity has come in to tell him she might be going crazy, because she thinks she saw a ghost.

Rung leads her to a chair. Velocity sits down and starts talking before he can say anything, sounding apologetic.

“Forget the part about craziness. It’s not a good word. They taught me better than that.” She shakes her head and looks at him. “But I do need your help. I just saw something and I need to know if I’m imagining things.”

Rung doesn’t sigh. He doesn’t close his eyes and ask for temperance and patience. What he does do is offer Velocity an energon stick and explain to her that that’s not how psychiatry works. Nor mental illness.

“I know. I know. It took me a while to get out of med school, so I definitely know.” She breaks the stick in half, plays with one of the halves while she eats the other one. Rung waits. “But you seem like the most qualified one to talk to about this. About what I saw.”

"And what was it you saw?"

"A human. Or the ghost of one. Have there been any humans on this ship?"

"Not that I know of, unless we count holomatter avatars."

"Oh!" She relaxes, clearly content with the possible explanation. "I hadn’t thought of that… It would explain the weird hair... Although she was walking on the wall. Do avatars do that?"

"They can do that, but most mechs prefer to stick to traditional movement patterns when projecting them."

“So it was probably an avatar. Good.” She smiles, eats the second half of the energon stick. “Sorry for coming here like this. I figured that if I talked to anyone else they would think it was an actual ghost or that I was seeing things, and I was sure that neither was the truth.”

“It’s fine, Velocity. I understand. Just for curiosity, who did you see? What did the ‘human’ look like?”

“Someone with pigtails. I didn’t see her face, so I can’t give you more details.” She shrugged. “Whose avatar is that?”

“Whirl’s, probably. It’s the only one I can think of right now that wears their hair like that.”

Velocity looks like she’s about to say something else, but then the alarm starts sounding and she stands up, quickly making her way to the door, and he can see that any thoughts about her earlier scare are gone, replaced by thoughts about what the current emergency might be, and what she can do to help.

After that, everything’s slightly chaotic for a while, what with Getaway’s plot and Froid showing up and his own resigning, but when everything’s over, he has time to think. A lot of time to think.

Some things start falling into place, little details that make no sense, moments that had seemed irrelevant when they happened, but which gain importance in hindsight. There isn’t anything big, but when he starts thinking about Velocity seeing Whirl’s holomatter avatar, Rung wonders why Whirl would have decided to walk around like that, since he hadn’t been in the brig that day. He thinks about how the event coincided with Tailgate being set up, and Cyclonus showing up to save him. He thinks about Cyclonus and Whirl’s uneasy… ‘friendship’, he might call it, if he had to give a name to their relationship, and how it had seemed to gain a new layer since then.

And then Rung thinks about Whirl losing an arm some time ago, and Getaway giving him a quick look of anoyance at _Swerve’s_ that day, too quick to matter - Rung thinks that the only reason Getaway allowed himself to look at Whirl like that was that he hadn’t noticed Rung was looking at him.

Rung thinks, and jumps to conclusions, and he doesn’t like them at all.

He doesn’t have any proof, anyway, so he should let it be.

Instead, he makes his way to Whirl’s habsuite and knocks.

"Who's there?" Whirl’s voice sounds slightly different, softer in a way that can’t be attributed to the door between them.

"It's me," Rung says, before thinking of how many bots on board probably wouldn’t recognize his voice. "Rung."

The door opens, revealing Whirl's holomatter avatar staring up at him, single eye narrowed. It's the smaller version today, the one without the spikes.

"I know who you are," she says, looking almost offended. It’s an strange experience to have a Whirl that can show expressions, no matter how many times he has seen it before, Rung still has trouble adjusting to reading Whirl’s face besides from his body language and tone - it’s like being handed an expanded alphabet for a language he thought he already knew.

Whirl moves away from the door and gestures for him to enter, closing the door after him. Whirl - the original, familiar one - is on his recharge slab. Rung looks at him, lying still and silent, looking like he’s resting, but then he's also next to Rung, waiting, arms at her sides, expression neutral.

“So, doc, was there anything you wanted?”

“I talked to Velocity the other day. When everything happened with Tailgate.”

“And?” She crosses her arms, tilts her head slightly, raises an eyebrow, her fingers start tapping on her arm. She couldn’t look more impatient and annoyed if she tried, and it occurs to Rung that she must be trying, that Whirl’s using everything she has now, everything this form gives her to convey that exact attitude.

“She told me that she’d seen you on the medbay that day. This you,” he clarifies, pointing to the human form. “You gave her quite a scare.”

“Does she want an apology?”

“I thinks she’s forgotten about it, considering everything that happened afterwards.”

“Then… why are you bringing it up?”

“I’ve been thinking about that day. You were seen in other places… did you have any visitors that day? Anyone curious about that?”

Rung is gambling here. Whirl can say whatever she wants, and Rung has no way of finding out whether or not she’s lying, but he’s hoping she trusts him enough after all this time to tell him the truth about that day.

Whirl’s face is expressionless. It’s too neutral, like she's consciously keeping any hint of an emotion from showing, and the centuries without practice have led her to overdoing it.

“I’m not in the mood to talk,” she says and turns her back to him, leaves him standing in front of the door as she goes to the work table that’s by one of the walls.

Rung waits for her to climb to the top of the table and settle there, legs crossed, before turning for the door.

“Leaving already?” she asks.

Rung looks over his shoulder at her.

“Since you aren’t in the mood to talk, I assumed you didn’t want me here.”

“If I wanted you out, I would have told you. Make yourself comfortable if you want,” she says, gesturing to a couple of chairs in the middle of the room.

Rungs sits down, takes out a holopad he can pretend to read and waits, darting glances to Whirl every now and then. She’s grabbed a clock and started working on it, the small fingers of the projection easily manipulating whatever that is inside it. One of her hands remains settled on the clock's carcass, the fingers spread in a way similar to the usual claws, index and middle fingers together, ring and little fingers together.

He studies the clocks around Whirl, the ones on a shelf behind her, the one in her hands, wonders how long it must have taken her to make them, wonders what about the current one is making her clench her jaw, narrow her eye and curl her fingers over the carcass like she’s trying to dig them into it, what’s got her so frustrated that she hasn’t called him out for staring.

He politely goes back to his holopad when she pulls out her hand from inside the clock, holding a wire between the middle and ring fingers.

“You got questions, don’t you?” Rung looks up. Whirl is watching him intently, single eye focused entirely on him, her shoulders tense. “You can ask _one_ ,” she says.

Rung considers what to ask. He wants to know why there are so many clocks, where he gets the supplies, if anybody else knows about this, but Whirl’s already trusting him with this, with seeing her working on the clocks, so he’s not sure how much he can push. This isn’t therapy, there isn’t a next session where he can pick up wherever he leaves on today, this is just Rung’s curiosity about an event completely unrelated to watchmaking, one that Whirl might have nothing to do with.

“Why use you avatar for this? I remember you had a variety of tools when we traveled in time.”

Whirl smirks and relaxes.

“I use those for the most part, but this part’s tricky.” She holds up the wire she’d just pulled out. “I’m trying out different ways to do it. Do you get that problem with your model ships?”

“Sometimes, yes. I’ve yet to find the best method to maintain the guns.”

Whirl grins.

“I heard about that. How did you get the idea to put guns on them?”

“Everyone on board has different means to defend themselves. I didn’t want to be left behind,” Rung says, shrugging.

Whirl shakes her head, amused, and goes back to work.

Rung goes back to the holopad in his hands, slowly becoming engrossed in the text instead of just skimming it to pass the time. At some point he stops glancing at Whirl, and he almost jumps when her voice interrupts his reading.

“I did have a visitor that day,” she says.

Rung looks at her. The clock on her lap is complete, and she’s looking at it with a critical eye. She purses her lips, clearly unsatisfied with the result.

“Cyclonus went to see me. I told him I had a headache and wasn’t receiving visitors and he left. He told me he went to save Tailgate after that.”

Rung nods and waits for her to continue. He won’t ask any questions, he’ll just accept whatever Whirl gives him.

“Cyclonus went to see me after everything, said he'd seen me,” at this, she points to herself, “outside his window. And that he’d seen me earlier that day. I don’t remember that... What do you think?”

Whirl’s gaze is expectant.

“So... That day Cyclonus visited you and you don't remember. You don't know if you had any other visitors either.”

“That’s right,” Whirl says, nodding. “Besides that, your guess is as good as mine.”

Rung has to bite his glossa to keep himself from asking what Whirl’s guess is.

“You should go now, I’m tired,” Whirl says, pushing away the clock and jumping to the floor. “Thanks for the company,” she adds, and there’s a tinge of sarcasm in her tone that makes Rung pause.

“Thank you for allowing me to stay,” Rung says honestly. Hopefully Whirl noticed it.

“Yes, yes,” she says, opening the door and motioning for him to leave. “It was nice.”

The door closes behind Rung as soon as he steps out of the habsuite. He turns to look at it before making his way to his own, pushing out of his mind any thoughts about Whirl’s possible involvement in Getaway’s plot.

Instead, he thinks about the last hour, about sitting in Whirl’s habsuite reading. He thinks about that time Whirl called him a friend, and how they’ve never talked about it.

He thinks about Whirl making clocks.

**Author's Note:**

> English isn't my first language and I don't have a beta reader for this fandom, so if you can point out any mistakes you see (or if you want to beta this), I'd be eternally grateful. I blame my phone's autocorrect for any mistakes I did while editing.
> 
> The title is vaguely taken from The Dresden Dolls' "[Girl Anachronism](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO5APfKnR50)", which is a Whirl song to me.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
